Google Analytics came out with a novel benchmarking feature which compares your site's performance to other websites in your field. You can see this benchmark data ONLY IF you are willing to aggregate your data into the pool of anonymized data.

The best sites in your industry probably are not using Google Analytics, and those who do are probably not benchmarking against average, so you are essentially benchmarking your site against a random sample of the bottom half of your industry. I guess such a measurement has purpose, unfortunately I fail to see it.

I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some. - Herbert Rappaport

Could someone please tell me where I can buy the SEOBOOK. All I can see now is how to sign up for the $100 per month training program and as I'm just dipping my toe into the water it's way too rich for my blood...

I agree, why wouldn't top industry players decline to use Analytics and its Benchmarking feature? I think any competitive business owner would want to find out as much market research as they can about their industry...even if a lot of companies don't use it.

Not wanting to give Google their data. Companies like eBay, Amazon, etc. probably have far better internal statistics and analytics stats (with built in goal based automated strategies based on season and market) than they can get from Google Analytics.

In their struggle with ad fatigue, search engines need more and more relevant data to display more relevant content. There is still some data that can further improve results relevancy, data like: time spent on a page, user’s bookmarks, direct visits, CTR levels through SERPs, bounce rates, etc. The data is hard to collect unless you’re using some sort of tracking system that can track and send the data to the search engines.

THE CATCH:

They (Google) have the data now. They need a way to access that data in an "official" way. That's the catch with the benchmarking. They just found a way to make you share the data ... officially.

Majority of Analytics users are small website / blog / forum users and I don't think many people would like to do that for the simple reason that we all have big ego and would not like to see the data which may not makes you feel good. I for that matter will not compare the data for my site gadgetgyan.com

You can only guess at what Google desires to give you and how they may change it over time to further favor themselves. Any conclusions you or I come to will have little to no effect on the conclusions Google comes to with what they feel is fair, just, right, do no evil, etc.

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